A/N: This is the next story in a mild AU/canon divergence series called The Other Guardian 'verse. There's a detailed note about it on my profile page, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam.
This story is a set of drabbles set over the summer; it follows "Starbright," and focuses on the evolution of Castiel's feelings as he and Sam grow closer, moment by tiny moment. Rotating perspectives, including Dean's; this story is still technically pre-slash, but getting closer to full slash all the time.
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For one disjointed moment, Sam thought he must be dreaming. Then his hip slammed into the sharp corner of the wooden table, sending a shower of paper and pencils skittering across the surface at it wobbled, and leaving an intense throbbing that certainly meant he had broken at least of few capillaries. Maybe a whole blood vessel had ruptured, with the way his heart was pumping the blood through his body at double time.
"Ca…Cas…" Sam stuttered, trying to steady the table and gather the fleeing pencils all at once. His lips parted but no other words quite managed to find their way to the forefront of his mind.
"Dean said that none of my clothes were appropriate for accompanying you on a…sting." Castiel's voice was calm, his face smooth but for one small crease in his forehead that Sam knew from experience meant that Dean had both insulted and confused the angel. Sam swallowed against his suddenly dry mouth. There had to be some confusion somewhere, though, because Cas was standing there not wearing a stitch of clothing, and that could not have been what Dean intended.
Sam was trying his damnedest not to break eye contact with the angel—trying so hard he thought maybe he hadn't blinked since his eyes had locked with that deep blue. Castiel's bare shoulders sloped down out of the edge of his Sam's vision, the soft lines of the muscles under the skin of his chest between.
Sam's eyes hadn't felt this dry since he'd challenged Dean to a staring contest to decide who had to tell Dad about the chip in his favorite hunting knife.
Cas was obviously waiting for Sam to say something. His eyebrows had drawn together slightly, meaning that whatever expression Sam had on his face was way too close to exactly how he was feeling, but he wasn't sure what to do. He was frozen.
Because Cas was an angel. And he had seen Sam unclothed before. And it meant nothing, so… Sam's eyes moved the barest fraction of an inch, enough to take in the contours of the angel's chest that smoothed into the lines of his diaphragm and stomach before he forced them back up.
If he was even a little bit tempted to look, then it did mean something and he absolutely shouldn't. Like Bobby had scolded them many a time as kids when Dean got into the locked cabinets where the whisky was—if I didn't think you were going to drink it, it wouldn't be a problem…
But on the other hand. Cas was an angel, and this might be the only chance Sam ever got for some harmless admiration. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he couldn't pass up. Like going to Rome and not seeing the statue of David.
Sam's heart thumped in his chest and he took a deep breath, letting his eyes slip—
"Jesus Fucking Christ!" Dean's swearing cut through the moment from the doorway so sharply Sam took a step back, red flaming in his cheeks. The chair scraped against the floor behind him, and this time there was no stopping the clatter of pencils as they hit the floor.
"You creepy, insane…do you have a screw loose?" Dean demanded. Castiel stiffened and the temperature in the room seemed to drop slightly.
"You said my clothes were unacceptable…"
Dean cut him off. "Your clothes, you psycho perv, not your underwear. My god, you—"
Sam's brother never got a chance to finish, the last of his statement lost in a whirl of wind and the sound of feathers. The rest of the notes flew off the table, fluttering down around the room.
And Sam just stood there, eyes fixed on the spot where Cas had disappeared—half relieved, because now the choice was out of his hands, and half wistful, because he had a feeling he had just missed his chance to admire the most beautiful thing on earth.
.x.
"Well, it's official," Dean announced, pausing in his epic toothbrushing to spit into the sink. "Cas is a royal perv."
"What?" Sam yelled from the bedroom, too busy dumping clothes and weapons into their duffel bags to come hold a conversation like a civilized person. Dean rolled his eyes.
"My guardian angel is a full-on flasher," he called out, the "f" of "flasher" spraying toothpaste drops across the mirror.
"What?" Sam repeated, over a particularly loud rattle that could only be Sam shaking the bag of silver crucifixes like a tambourine. Dean shook his head at the handsome stud in the mirror.
"Cas is a freak!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. Of course, the second he opted to just belt it out, the noise stopped and Sam appeared in the doorway, wincing at the echoes of his declaration. Sam assumed the classic bitch pose, leaning against the doorway with his hands on his hips.
"He's not a freak, Dean," his brother said. Dean had no idea why Sam was defending that creepola, but it was beyond time to set his little brother straight, with a slobbery toothbrush if necessary.
"Okay, Sam—let me give you a scenario here. Forty-something guy with unshaved stubble and a penchant for wearing flasher coats pops in on somebody buck-ass naked. In what universe in that guy not a freak?"
Sam rolled his eyes too—it looked a lot bitchier on him. "It's just Cas, Dean. He's…different."
Dean snorted and felt the tingle of minty fresh in the back of his nostrils. "Yeah. Different. You know, I don't know that many angels, but I can't imagine Uriel popping by for a chat in the nude. Let me just say that." The mental picture was more disturbing than he'd expected, and Dean gave his teeth another vigorous scrubbing, hoping that would chase the taste of preemptive bile out of his mouth. He spit, rinsed, and then looked up at Sam, wrinkling his nose like Dean practicing oral hygiene was the gross part here. "I'm telling you, Sam—something went wrong the day God made that one. If the factory warranty was still in effect, I'd haul his ass back if I had to crash the Impala to get there."
"Dean…"
"Don't Dean me," Dean shot back. "And don't pretend you're above all this—every time he's come down since then, you haven't been able to talk to anything but the lamp. And since you're looking at it, then he looks at it—it's like a Three Stooges routine in here. But hey, I can't blame you for blackballing the guy—you got the worse side of it. Let me tell you, though: a big slice of angel ass ain't all it's cracked up to be."
Dean was hoping for a laugh, maybe a groan from his unimpressed audience. But when he finished polishing his gums and looked back at Sam through the mirror, he was surprised to find a serious flush across his brother's face, all the way out to the tips of his ears. Sam had also slipped into his favorite defensive pose: arms crossed over his chest, shoulders so tense they were bunched up almost to his ears.
"I didn't…it's not…I wasn't looking at him, Dean," Sam protested, nervously forking a clump of hair out of his eyes. Dean hacked up a lump of toothpaste laughing.
"The hell you weren't. He was like two feet from you; it was unavoidable. Besides, I know you were having a nightmare about him last night."
Sam's face went from red to white so fast Dean was shocked the blood didn't squirt out his nose. "What?" Sam sort of wheezed. Dean cocked his head back toward the beds.
"Yeah. When I got up to use the can last night, you were tossing and turning and crap, groaning like you were being tortured. I heard you say his na—"
"I'm gonna put the bags in the car!" Sam announced all of a sudden, vanishing from the doorway like Speedy Gonzales with that fat orange cat on his tail. For a long moment Dean just stood there with a ring of toothpaste around his lips, watching his brother's dust—then he shook his head and stuck his mouth under the faucet, getting the last minty grits out of the gaps in his teeth.
Apparently he wasn't the only one traumatized by the angel peep show.
.x.
Castiel had never had to strain to hear a prayer. Angels were soldiers, not guardians, but it did not matter—Castiel had always heard every prayer that called him by name, anonymous voices crying out to him from the darkness of the lower world. He'd had to learn to block them out. But there was something different about this one, just a breath of sound that teased at the back of his mind and paused him in his flight, wings swept back by the wind of the spheres. There were no words at all, just the feeling of a soft voice saying his name, reaching out across the vastness of six dimensions and somehow, impossibly, breaking through. It reminded him of the first time Sam had leaned down to whisper to him, his lips just brushing the contour of his vessel's ears.
Without thought Castiel found himself in a dark field, the long grasses swaying against his knees and the night sky whose paths he had walked broken open above him in an infinite net of stars. The grass sighed as each blade rustled against the next. For a fraction of a moment, Castiel wondered if that was what he heard, if the Earth itself was calling his name—then he turned and found himself a few steps from the front of the Impala, and Sam stretched out across the hood, his long limbs loose against the metal that clicked as it cooled. His feet swung lightly back and forth as he lifted his head and smiled at the angel in the center of his view.
"Hey, Cas."
Castiel took an uncertain step toward him, the grasses parting before him like a sea. "Did you pray to me, Sam?" he asked, softly because there was something about Sam at ease on the hood of the car that he did not want to disturb.
Sam shook his head slowly. "No. I mean, I was thinking about you…Dean needed the hotel room for…uh…anyway, I decided to get lost for a while."
Castiel turned back to survey the world behind him—the endlessness of the low fields, the gray-green shape of distant windbreaks the only boundary between earth and sky. Far off to the right was a field of a different kind, towering white windmills churning against the dark. Castiel wondered if this was the sort of place humans might seek out when they wanted to be lost. Briefly he remembered when the area had been a vast sea, waves instead of grain undulating out into the infinite darkness. Then he turned back to the car, the past disintegrating as it always did when he was with Sam.
"What are you doing here?" Castiel persisted, stepping forward until he was flush with the front of the car. The metal was cold against his knees.
Sam shrugged, the heavy fabric of his coat dragging against the hood. "Just…looking at the stars, I guess. Making wishes." He said the last almost too quietly for Castiel to hear; it reminded the angel of the sound that had brought him down, the softest whisper of faith or desire, somehow so mesmerizing in Sam's voice. Castiel tipped his head to one side.
"Why were you thinking about me?" he asked.
Sam ducked his head over a private little smile. "I always think about you when I'm looking at the stars, Cas."
For a moment Castiel did not answer, only stood where he was and took him in, Sam, his body molded to the curve of the hood, surrounded by the reflection of the stars overhead as if he were stretched out across an immovable sea. His hand was moving without him again—somehow he was brushing the edge of Sam's thigh, the backs of his fingers pressed to the rough material of his jeans, and Sam's eyes were on his, asking questions Castiel did not know how to answer. He opened his mouth to ask one of his own.
"Do you want me to stay, Sam?"
Sam shifted, leaning up on one elbow to meet his gaze. "Do you want to stay?" he asked in return.
Castiel drew his hand away, pressed it to the cold metal to forget how warm Sam had been. "For now."
Sam's mouth twisted into a smile. Then he edged over to make room on the hood, and Castiel leaned back against the car, feeling the rhythm of Sam's heartbeat through the worn metal beneath them. He tipped his head back and wondered if when he looked at the stars, now, he would always think about Sam.
